What a task awaits us!
A hundred years of joy and satisfaction are ahead of us.
Adolf Hitler
(...) Scenarios of the "what if" type with a "thousand-year Reich" occasionally stimulated the imagination of writers of popular novels, lovers of military history, and a few professional historians. Writers such as Len Dayton, Robert Harris and, more recently, American politician Newt Gingrich (with varying degrees of historical accuracy) have used the Third Reich as the backdrop for their popular thrillers. Others, most recently Ralph Giordano, offer less speculative accounts of what would have happened "had Hitler won the war." However, such writers as a rule overlook the fact that in the system of competing Nazi services, which represented a plurality of ideological tendencies, more than one final outcome was possible. Moreover, most of those books reflect a latent (Anglo-American or German) concern about the economic and political power of the recently unified Federal Republic of Germany, the implications of which are deeply resentful. In contrast, military historians, whose contributions in this area are mostly "operational", from their comfortable offices, generally just deploy armies in various positions. Presenting considerations of a very different quality, professional historians such as Johann Thies focus on symbolic expressions of Nazi megalomania, deriving plans for "world domination" from architectural blueprints for the post-war period, or exploring Nazi plans for a pseudo-European union or a single currency.
However, when it comes to the Eastern Front, it is unnecessary to imagine hypothetical scenarios, because there is a very large amount of preserved documentation that relates to the immediate future, as well as the long term. For more than three years, the Germans fought and conquered huge areas of the Soviet Union, behind the front line, which in some places went 2.000 kilometers deep. So, we can clearly see how Germany, if it had won, would have treated the territories of the dismembered Soviet Union. A real abundance of plans has been preserved. To construct a plausible counterfactual, we need only imagine a war victory.
ROSENBERG'S COUNTERFACTUAL: How would events have developed if, according to the advice given to him by the generals, Hitler had managed to conquer Moscow before the beginning of the winter of 1941, in the way he envisioned - Operation "Wotan" - writes military historian James Lucas? Let's imagine, allowing ourselves such an excursion into fantasy, that some accident happened to Stalin and the leadership of the Stavka before they managed to escape from the besieged capital, or during the escape itself, and that this resulted in the collapse of the Red Army, which no longer she had no will to offer organized resistance. Reading between the lines of this brief description of specific events, we can easily glimpse some of the alternative strategies of domination that could have been implemented in the occupied Soviet Union, rather than actions being determined by a combination of crude Nazi racial dogma in Hitler's interpretation and military-economic necessity. The occupiers were able to exploit separatist aspirations and establish a series of puppet regimes (controlled by German governors) in the Baltic countries, Belarus, the Caucasus and Ukraine. The Bolshevik edifice would be undermined by the decollectivization and reprivatization of property, the restoration of religious freedom, and so on. Considering the configuration of the terrain and the existence of weapons factories on the other side of the Urals, it is likely that the resistance would continue, but the counterbalance would be provided by numerous collaborators, who would see that the Bolsheviks had played their part.
It is obvious that such a strategy could have success. In Lviv, Western Ukrainian nationalists under the leadership of Stepan Bandera staged an anti-Soviet rebellion (and carried out pogroms) before the arrival of the German invaders. Throughout the occupied territories, large parts of the local population joined the collaboration. About a million Russians cooperated with the German armed forces in various ways, and primarily they formed unarmed auxiliary forces, called Hiwis, according to the German acronym, but there were also more than a quarter of a million armed soldiers who accepted the collaboration, including the "Kaminsky" brigade, which helped put down the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, then Vlasov's Russian Liberation Army, and various Cossack, Kalmyk, or Tatar detachments that are less well known today than their Baltic or Ukrainian SS counterparts. Some nationalities were better represented in the Wehrmacht than in the Red Army. As Russian post-Soviet historians are now revealing, the former communists, as amoral masters of control, policing and intimidation, were also present in the ranks of the collaborators of the occupiers.
Therefore, those who had a deeper understanding of the nature of political war, for example in the Propaganda Department of the Wehrmacht, warned against provoking the hostility of the Russian people by flirting with unbalanced emigrant separatists. Instead, it should aim to create a divide between the Kremlin and the Russian population, using the slogan "Liberation, not conquest." From a different perspective, Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, also fiercely hated the Russians, like his Führer, but he combined that hatred with an understanding of the differences that divided them from other national groups, and the strategic benefits that could be derived from that. He envisioned the establishment of a protectorate over Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Belarus, the expansion of Ukraine, the establishment of the Caucasian Federation, and - in the environment of such a sanitary cordon - the re-establishment of a significantly reduced Muscovy, whose dynamics would be redirected towards Asia. Plans were drawn up for the establishment of Reichskommesariat in the Caucasus or in Muscovy. Rosenberg and his group of Eastern experts even occasionally dreamed of a Crimean Muftiat or a broad Pan-Turanian bloc made up of former Soviet Central Asia, with corresponding changes in the description of Tatars and Turks (classical Untermenchen) in German propaganda.
It was precisely in that part of the Soviet Union - specifically, in the north of the Caucasus - that the German occupation policy most successfully benefited from the concessions it made to the local population. The non-Slavic origins of the people, the fact that the Chechens and Karachays threw off the Soviet yoke before the arrival of the Germans, the need to make a good impression on neighboring Turkey, and the fact that the army remained under control - all this resulted in a significantly more conciliatory approach, which is clearly visible in the tone following military directives:
1. Be friendly to the population of the Caucasus. (…)
2. Do not put obstacles in the way of Mountaineers who want to abolish collective state farms.
3. Allow the reopening of temples of all religions.
4. Respect private property and pay for requisitioned goods.
5. Gain the trust of the population through exemplary behavior.
6. State the reasons for all harsh measures that affect the population.
7. Especially respect the honor of Caucasian women.
The German authorities recognized the Karachay National Committee and entrusted it with the administration of the former Soviet state factories and forests. The Balkars, a Muslim people, welcomed the German visitors at the Kurman festivities, giving them horses as a return gift for the Kurmans and weapons obtained. When the SS Security Service was preparing to kill the Tatas, or Mountain Jews, a local committee intervened with the military command, which ordered the Security Service to desist from doing so. Cattle herds were reprivatized, and forced labor was reduced to a minimum. In turn, a large number of local residents fought on the side of the Germans, and Hitler declared: "I consider only Muslims reliable." Along with another three and a half million members of other nations, as estimated to have been deported by the Soviets to Kazakhstan and Central Asia, they will to pay a terrible price during and after the war.
HITLER'S VISION: The problem was that the strategy of cooperation with national minorities was proposed by groups that lacked political weight. On the contrary, based on Hitler's own statements, it is clearly seen that this is actually the case in a political sense the least likely of all possible outcomes of a German military victory. Judging by his Conversations at the table, in which his peculiar observations about the Arian Jesus, about the vegetarianism of Caesar's legions, about prehistoric dogs, as well as obiter dictates like: "Whores worship poachers", Hitler found "that East" both attractive and repulsive. Not seeing the irony, he called Russia a desert; the past was to be secured for that country only by his battles. Wide roads, built over mountain passes, to be cleared of snow by the wind, were supposed to pass through German cities and settlements. Crimea was to become the German Riviera.
It is characteristic that he expressed much more clearly the negative sides of his ideas, specifically - the desire to impose a particularly barbaric and cruel version of colonial rule on the "natives", so inhumane that it looks like something he read in some kind of gruesome book. He particularly liked and often used the analogy with British rule in India: "Our role in Russia will be analogous to England's role in India." (…) Russian space is our India. Like the English, we will rule that empire with a handful of people." He predicted the settlement of that "space" with German peasant-soldiers, i.e. veterans after twelve years of military service, although there was also space in the Baltic for Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish settlers - for these lastly he added a typically irrelevant and arbitrary provision: "by separate agreement". He intended large farms for the settlers, nice apartments for the civil servants, and "palaces" for the regional governors. The German colonial society was supposed to literally and metaphorically represent a "fortress", closed to foreigners, because "even the most insignificant of our stable boys must be superior in relation to every native inhabitant". The latter represent "a mass of born slaves, who feel the need for a master." Foreigners (that is, Germans) brought the notion of organized society to peoples who would otherwise behave antisocially like "rabbits." Health and hygiene were to be a thing of the past: "There is no vaccination for Russians, and there is no soap to wash." (...) But let them have as much alcohol and tobacco as they want." With characteristic insensitivity, he said on October 17, 1941:
“We're not going to pretend to be babysitters; we have absolutely no obligations when it comes to that people. To fight against the poor, to dispel fleas, to provide German teachers, to publish newspapers - very few things belong to us! (…) As for the rest, teach them just enough to understand traffic signs so they don't get run over by our vehicles!" If the Russians rebel, "we just have to drop a few bombs on their cities, and the matter will be over." Economic relations were supposed to imply the harshest exploitation: "At harvest time we will set up markets in all important centers." There we will buy all the grain and fruit, and we will sell our worthless products. (…) Our agricultural machinery factories, our transport companies, our home appliance manufacturers and so on will find a huge market for their products there. It will also be an excellent market for cheap cotton goods - the more colorful the better. Why should we suppress the desire of that people for bright colors?" Ukrainians were to be tempted with scarves, beads, "and everything that colonial peoples love."
Such attitudes - shared by most of his generals - characterized German occupation policy in Russia, eliminating any possibility of exploiting the widespread unpopularity of the Bolshevik regime, especially in the areas occupied by Stalin under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, or the deep ethnic and religious divisions that latently existed in the Soviet empire. Hitler was simply unwilling to set aside ideological imperatives in the interest of gaining the support of the local population. His sense of German racial superiority completely precluded any concessions towards national autonomy - except in areas the Nazis did not want to settle, or where they were adapting policies to a wider Muslim or Turkish-Tatar audience.
This had immediate political consequences for Rosenberg and his supporters. Powerless even to determine who would occupy the highest positions in his large and largely imaginary fiefdom, Rosenberg had to suffer the appointment of Erich Koch, who despised slave Slavs as much as Hitler himself, to the position of Reichskommissar in Ukraine, and to give the same position in Ostland was given to Hinrich Loze, who, of course, opposed all of Rosenberg's attempts to grant some small measure of strictly limited autonomy to the three Baltic states. In practice, separatist activities – or, more precisely, the redrawing of political maps – took place solely under German supervision, and no element of self-determination was allowed. The feverish desire of all fascists, nationalists or religious émigrés to turn the German invasion to their advantage remained largely unheeded. They were used, rejected, and in some cases imprisoned and killed - and many of them later met the same fate at the hands of the vengeful NKVD (in the case of Stepan Bandera, in the 1950s in Munich, where he worked at Radio Free Europe).
HIMLER'S COUNTERFACTUAL: However, Hitler was not the only one who opposed Rosenberg's policy. Both his and Loze's local power were opposed by the economic services of the Reich, which operated independently of Rosenberg's ministry in Berlin, and more importantly, also by Himmler's senior SS and police commanders.
Economic and military necessity stopped all attempts by the Bolsheviks to reform their socio-economic order so that it would become more attractive to the local population. As we have seen, Hitler's idea of future German-Russian economic relations was based on cruel exploitation. Practical reasons dictated that the changes in the institution of collective farming be only cosmetic. Decollectivizations, with all the relocations they entail, would greatly complicate the army's efforts to secure food supplies. It was much easier for the SS units to turn the kolkhozes into land holdings than to later struggle with the "rationalization" of the small farms that had just been returned to their owners. As Bakke, the Secretary of State for Agriculture, noted, if the Bolsheviks had not established collective farms, the Germans would have had to invent them. German propaganda posters said: "The end of the kolkhoz!" A free peasant on his own land!", with the depiction of German soldiers using their butts to lift the burden of vodka-drenched bureaucrats from the shoulders of Russian peasants. In reality, it was different. Although Rosenberg, with his Agrarian Decree of February 15, 1942, established "communal economies" made up of individual farms, the semi-feudal "working days" and compulsory tithe-like contributions that serfs had to pay to their masters were no different from the hated Soviet system. In the industrial economy, only the Germans participated in the struggle for ownership - various services and the private sector - and firms such as "Flick", "Krupp" and "Mannesman" functioned in their sectors as "guardians" of Soviet firms.
It is interesting to imagine what would have happened if such economic exploitation had been at least as successful as German policy in Western Europe (especially in France). But the fact is that she was not. The overriding reason for this lies in the fact that the policy in the occupied territories was increasingly determined by the darkest of all Nazi leaders, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, whose priorities were racial and not economic in nature. Indeed, it is perhaps Himmler's plans for Eastern Europe that give us the best insight into how the Germans would have governed if they had won the war.
Himmler believed that the East "belonged" to the SS, which should take control of the deportation, repatriation and extermination of entire populations. We find the beginning of that dominance long before Operation "Barbarossa", in the context of the occupation of Poland. Already on October 24, 1939, shortly after securing the title of Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Ethnic Germanism, Himmler gave a speech to SS leaders in Poznań on the subject of the German settlement of Poland. Each settlement was supposed to consist of a leading core of peasant soldiers (selected from the ranks of the SS), surrounded by estates of settlers from the "old Reich", and then also an outer ring of ethnic Germans. Poles would make up the labor force on the farms. With characteristic pedantry, the Reichsführer states how thick the bricks used to build the houses on the estates should be, stresses that bathrooms and showers should be installed in the basements "for the peasant who returns sweaty from the fields", and forbids "kitsch and city trinkets" in peasant houses, which should be "neither luxurious nor primitive".
(...) The invasion of the Soviet Union provided Himmler with a huge expansion of the potential field of action. To this end, two days after the start of the invasion, he gave Professor Mayer a deadline of three weeks to submit to him a preliminary draft of the future German settlement policy in the expanded occupied territories. Even within the framework of the SS, the field of planning was crowded. Thus Reinhard Heydrich, the new Reichsprotector of Bohemia-Moravia, in his inaugural speech delivered to senior officials of the occupation regime in Prague on October 2, 1941, outlined his plans for the settlement of the East. They were based on two separate moral universes. In the first, the Germans will treat related peoples, such as the Dutch, Flemings and Scandinavians, relatively politely. On the other side, in the East, the German military elite will manage the "helots" - "if I may use a drastic term" - who will be the labor force for the big projects. After that, some kind of human polderization should have followed. The outer wall of peasant-soldiers was supposed to represent "an eternal dam against the stormy flood of men from Asia." Behind that first line of defense, the German settlement of one "space" after another was supposed to provide an ever-widening ring of additional "barrages", which would begin at Danzig - West Prussia and the Wartegau.
In late 1941, the SS Reich Main Security Service compiled its own version General Plan East, whose content we can guess from a critical comment made in April 1942 by Dr. Erhard Wetzel, a staff officer in charge of racial policy in Rosenberg's Ministry of Occupied Eastern Territories. That plan was to be implemented within thirty years after the end of the war. It referred to Poland, the Baltic states, Belarus, parts of Ukraine, "Ingermanland" (the area around Leningrad) and "Gotengau" (Crimea). The SS authors of this plan predicted that up to ten million Germans would settle in the occupied East, and that thirty-one million of the total forty-five million domestic inhabitants from those areas would be deported to the west of Siberia. Here Wenzel carefully corrects the arithmetic of the SS. Their original number of forty-five million domestic inhabitants obviously included five to six million Jews, whom the occupiers would have already "got rid of" before the evacuation. Moreover, taking into account such factors as the birth rate, the native population would actually number sixty to sixty-five million, of which forty-six to fifty-one million would be "resettled." The plan called for the deportation of various percentages of the various populations it targeted. Thus, "80 to 85 percent" of Poles (that is, twenty to twenty-four million people) were scheduled for "evacuation". Wecel did not like the idea of creating a new Poland in exile, especially because the presence of Poles would cause hostile reactions from the inhabitants of Siberia, which he wanted to turn against the Russians from the motherland. Thinking about what to do with the Poles - because "it goes without saying that we cannot liquidate the Poles like the Jews" - Wetzel proposed as an alternative strategy "giving incentives" to their intellectuals to emigrate to the south of Brazil, so that ethnic Germans could settle in their place. Members of the Polish lower class could go to Siberia, which, after the "pumping" of other peoples, would become a reborn, "Americanized" Buczkurish, different from the neighboring Russians. Sixty-five percent of Ukrainians and 75 percent of Belarusians were supposed to keep the Poles company on their way to the east. Wetzel strongly objects to the plan of the Main Security Service of the Reich for not mentioning the Russians. On the contrary, he had to offer detailed advice on limiting the multiplication of the Russian population, which he saw as a potential cause of future wars. In addition to the mass factory production of condoms, he proposed the requalification of midwives to perform abortions and the deliberate limitation of pediatric education, followed by voluntary sterilization and the suspension of all health care measures aimed at reducing the infant mortality rate. He concludes his commentary with observations about how some climatic regions in the area covered by this plan are not suitable for "Nordic-Phalian" settlers, and suggests planting forests in the Ukrainian steppe to correct the climate.(...)
